• To quote Brad Feld: “The great companies that I’ve been an investor in share a common trait – the founder/CEO is obsessed with the product.  Not interested, not aware of, not familiar with, but obsessed.  Every discussion trends back toward the product.  All of the conversations about customer are really about how the customer uses the product and the value the product brings the customer.  The majority of the early teams are focused entirely on the product, including the non-engineering people.  Product, product, product.”.

• I’ve always wondered if creating a separate virtual machine for each development environment would be worthwhile, especially for consultants working in a lot of different environments. Fortunately for me Alex tried it out and wrote his findings at: Using a Virtual Machine For Software Development

• I had never heard of “fauxting” (fake texting) to avoid a personal interaction until I read When You’re Only Text Friends by Charlotte Steinway

• I remember studying speech recognition in university a long time ago. It was ok, but it really wasn’t ready anywhere near primetime ready yet. Since then I’ve seen some improvements, but I haven’t really seen a commercial offering. This article helps to explain why speech recognition hasn’t really been moving forward much.

• John Chow has had an interesting and, well let’s say different, had interesting way of building up his blog community. He tried several traffic building techniques that were definitely on the gray side, which eventually got him banned from Digg, de-listed from Google for a while, and so on. However through all that he’s managed to come out ahead. This week, he’s trying a new technique where you can buy real Twitter followers (and not bots). He even explains how he will recoup the cost within 2-3 months.

• If you’re a software developer, this is one of those crazy stories that you just can make up.

• I just learned this week about the Memristor. If this YouTube video presentation is right, this could really revolutionize computers. I would compare this jump in computing power to the discovery of transistors. Here’s to hoping it’s real and will come to fruition sooner than later. 1 Petabyte in the size of a sugar cube! Whole databases in fast ram. The way we program would drastically change.

• I’m a big fan of history, not dates and places, but understanding how things were, which in turn explains how and why we are where we are today. Jeremy Keith wrote A Brief History of Markup which does a good job explaining the history of markup (more or less html).

• It’s been said that a picture is worth a thousand words. Well this picture about The [Real] Current State of Web Design says it all.

• With everything going on with Apple and Flash recently, it’s almost impossible not to have a related story. Hank Williams writes a good article on How Apple is Breaking the Law with the App Store.

• And if you don’t understand why there’s so much discussion about mobile computing these days (iPhone, BlackBerry, etc.), then you should check out this information graph about how teens are using their cell phones. Mobile computing is huge.

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